I'll add another dimension to this, not off subject. Here are my favorite rhymes from my poems. I really don't admire myself a lot, but about these I feel rather smug:

from "Three Poems by Lady Night" (appeared in premier issue of Measure):

The bare tree branches tremble in the breeze,
So sharp and sudden as twilight descends.
And over me my lover softly bends.
And I am young and proud of my beauties.

"breeze/beauties" is one I am quite proud of. And the courtesan (high-class call girl) in this is not just proud of her "beauty" but of her "beauties"--her eyes, hair, breasts, legs, etc.

Another from a poem by Chinese poet Li Po (appeared in Hellas):

I lift the cup aloft and I invite
The Moon to drink with me. To my delight,
She joins me—then my shadow makes us three!
Together we indulge in revelry.
The Moon drinks, and my shadow—what a laugh!—
Now imitates me down the moonlit path!

I like the "laugh/path" one too. Slant rhymes are good.

Both of these are translations. Perhaps translations bring out our resourcefulness more.

Your own favorite rhymes from your own poems?

But does "breeze" rhyme with "beauties"? I guess if you say it very carefully, in a way that gives both syllables of "beauties" an almost equal stress, you can almost consider it a rhyme, but, even though it sounds fine, I'm not sure it's actually a rhyme if you want to get technical about it.

Rhyming a stressed with an unstressed syllable was, once upon a time, something I objected to as "not a rhyme." Now I do it once in a while, as a source of variety, but only in poems built mainly with off-rhymes; for example, I've rhymed "lies" and "blowflies". I don't expect readers to alter stress from their normal pronunciations; I just ask them to accept an unusual pairing.

Roger--

I think the beauty of some rhymes is that they don't rhyme perfectly--or that the inflection makes the rhyme seem a little "off." That is precisely what I like bout "breeze" and "beauties" and "laugh" and "path." To me, when poets started to play creatively with rhyme, that's where it gets fun and becomes more delightful to read.

Here's a stanza from a sonnet by Irish poet John O'Donahue:

The day’s last light frames her by the window,
A young woman with distance in her gaze,
She could never imagine the surprise
That is hovering over her life now.

He often uses really far-out rhymes, and I like this sort of thing. I don't think conventional, exact rhyme is bad, but I love it when poets push the limits of rhyme.

So yes: what is rhyme?

Since David has sinned first by posting one of his own, here's an old poem of mine that I've always liked because of its rhymes. (I know it's bad form to admit to liking one of one's own poems.) I suspect it's too British for American readers:

MISS POSTLETHWAITE’S DOWNFALL

Water colours and reading
were Miss Postlethwaite’s passion
and in her own fashion
she had taste and breeding

“My dear father always”
her usual beginning
“Advised against sinning”
and lowered her gaze.

She cycled each morning
to open her shop
a convenient stop
for needs without warning.

Milk, eggs, stamps and pencils
and biscuits of all sorts
equipment for ball sports
and cardboard utensils.

The cad you expected
in the form of a vicar
managed to trick her
then promptly defected

Her shop gone and maybe
a worse fate in store
she courageously bore
a fatherless baby.

“My dear father always”
she said to her lawyer
“was a trusty employer
of the suitable phrase”

“And had Papa lasted
despite his bad stutter
I’m sure he would utter
the epithet bastard.”




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited January 11, 2008).]

Janet--if posting your own poems is a sin, I will say about the one you posted, O felix culpa! http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

I've never seen the early "Design," and it's encouraging to see Frost go from a blue-haired lady of 38 to the great master of 62, at least for one who hopes to hit his stride in his seventh decade! I had a poem take 24 years from the time I heard its concluding couplet in a bar. The quadruple rhyme was difficult in the extreme, and I had to gain some painful personal experience with aphids and custom combiners to bring it off.

The Honey Wagon

Some say the custom cutters wheeled
and dealed at his expense.
Some say the aphids ate his yield
and call it negligence.
Some of the neighbors’ lips are sealed,
the folks with common sense
say you can’t fertilize a field
by farting through the fence.

Now THAT was funny!

Here is a good rhymer I stumbled upon today. It may seem familiar.

Cassandra, by A.E. Stallings

If I may have failed to follow
Your instructions, lord Apollo,
So all my harping lies unstrung,
I blame it on the human tongue.

Our speech ever was at odds
With the utterance of gods:
Tenses have no paradigm
For those translated out of time.

Perhaps mortals should rejoice
To conjugate in passive voice—
The alphabet to which I go
Is suffering, and ends in O.

Paraphrase can only worsen:
For you, there is no second person,
“I want” the same verb as “must be,”
“Love,” construed as “yield to me,”

The homonym of “curse” and “give,”
No mood but the infinitive.
.........................................

Lots of the unexpected there in her rhymes.

annie

For sheer cleverness in rhyme one must turn to polysyllabic and mosaic rhyme. My favorites are Byron's use of ineffectual/hen pecked you all in "Don Juan" and Joanna Newsom's low-flying turkey/Texan drying jerky in her song, "Cassiopeia."

Joanna Newsom is my favorite singer/songwriter when it comes to clever rhymes. Read the lyrics to her album, "The Milk Eyed Mender" with attention to her rhymes: http://www.bentclouds.com/music/newsomlyrics.html

Watch this http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=Vc...eature=related as well as some of her other perfomances on You Tube.

She's delightful.

James

I heard a radio announcer say that he thought the most eloquent rhyme in Rock and Roll was this one (lines 3 and 4) from the song "Sweet City Woman" by the Canadian group Stampeders:

A country morning, all smothered in dew
Has got a way to make a man feel shiny and new
And she'll sing in the evening some familiar tunes
And she feeds me love and tenderness and maccaroons

Pretty good, eh?

dwl